Egalitarianism, Safety, and Virtue in Education: A Response to Callan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
So here we are: two more white cis-hetero male academics discussing the practice of "safe space." Is this practice necessary, we ask, to eradicate the academy's long-standing exclusion and domination of people deemed different from us, or does it constitute an unacceptable attack on academic freedom and the right to free speech? Eamonn Callan opens his essay "Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces" (2016) by briefly contrasting the arguments of each side before leading us on a search for middle ground between them. But I see much more truth in the first than in the second, and irony in the fact that we philosophize from our comfortable seats at the intersection of "ascribed privilege of certain kinds" (p. 64) on the efforts of the oppressed to liberate themselves from the very same systems of oppression that offer us such privilege. 1 Before directly addressing some of Callan's points, I think it might be helpful to do the same justice to the history of safe space that Callan does to that of the Western conception of human dignity. Bell (2015) traces the origins of safe space to group psychotherapy and the sensitivity training that social psychologist Kurt Lewin introduced to corporate America for leadership building in the 1940s. Two decades later, humanistic therapist Carl Rogers "developed the idea into encounter groups which were more aimed at self-actualisation and social change" (Bell, 2015, para. 12). 2 It was around this time that the concept of safe space appeared in the women's movement, claims It was not so much an end as it was a means, and not so much a physical space as one "created by the coming together of women searching for community" (p. 24). Also, while it failed to provide refuge from violence and harassment from police or others, it "[implied] a certain license to speak and act freely, form collective strength, and generate strategies for resistance" (p. 24). In short, safe space, which had previously been a corporate tool for self-improvement, became by the end of the 1960s an activist tool for social justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".